In the wake of The Guardianâ€™s remarkable revelation Wednesday that the National Security Agency is collecting phone records from millions of Americans, defenders of this dragnet surveillance program are insisting that the intelligence agency isnâ€™t eavesdropping on the calls â€“ itâ€™s just scooping up â€śmetadata.â€ť The implication is that civil liberties complaints about Orwellian surveillance tactics are overblown.

But any suggestion that Americans have nothing to worry about from this dragnet collection of communications metadata is wrong. Even without intercepting the content of communications, the government can use metadata to learn our most intimate secrets â€“ anything from whether we have a drinking problem to whether weâ€™re gay or straight. The suggestion that metadata is â€śno big dealâ€ť â€“ a view that, regrettably, is still reflected in the law â€“ is entirely out of step with the reality of modern communications.

So what exactly is metadata? Simply, if the â€śdataâ€ť of a communication is the content of an email or phone call, this is data about the data â€“ the identities of the sender and recipient, and the time, date, duration and location of a communication. This information can be extraordinarily sensitive. A Massachusetts Institute of Technology study a few years back found that reviewing peopleâ€™s social networking contacts alone was sufficient to determine their sexual orientation. Consider, metadata from email communications was sufficient to identify the mistress of then-CIA Director David Petraeus and then Â drive him out of office.

The â€śwho,â€ť â€śwhenâ€ť and â€śhow frequentlyâ€ť of communications are often more revealing than what is said or written. Calls between a reporter and a government whistleblower, for example, may reveal a relationship that can be incriminating all on its own.

Repeated calls to Alcoholics Anonymous, hotlines for gay teens, abortion clinics or a gambling bookie may tell you all you need to know about a personâ€™s problems. If a politician were revealed to have repeatedly called a phone sex hotline after 2:00 a.m., no one would need to know what was said on the call before drawing conclusions. In addition sophisticated data-mining technologies have compounded the privacy implications by allowing the government to analyze terabytes of metadata and reveal far more details about a personâ€™s life than ever before.

As technology advances, the distinction between data and metadata can be hard to distinguish. If a Websiteâ€™s content is data, is the Websiteâ€™s address metadata? The government has argued it is.

But like the list of books we check out of a library, the sites we â€śvisitâ€ť online are really a list of things weâ€™ve read. Not only do URLs often contain content â€“ such as search terms embedded within them â€“ but the very fact that weâ€™ve visited a page with a URL such as â€śwww.webmd.com/depressionâ€ť can be every bit as revealing as the content of an email message.

For this reason, law enforcement and intelligence agencies have long appreciated the value of metadata, and the outdated view that metadata surveillance is far less invasive than eavesdropping has allowed those agencies to use powerful surveillance tools with relatively little judicial oversight.

They can do this because, decades ago, long before the Internet altered all aspects of modern communication, the Supreme Court ruled that when we voluntarily divulge personal information to any third party, we waive our privacy rights and lose all Fourth Amendment protection over that information.

That decision would make sense if it was about, for example, why we canâ€™t reasonably expect something to remain private when we loudly boast about it in a bar.Â But the court extended that logic to phone calls. The argument was that since we â€śshareâ€ť the phone numbers we dial with the phone company â€“ which needs that information to connect the call â€“ we canâ€™t claim any constitutional protection when the government asks for that data.

After the Supreme Court took this wrong turn in the 1970s, Congress compounded in the 1980s by codifying a lesser standard of protection for metadata. But neither the court nor Congress could have foreseen that NSA supercomputers would one day be able to mine that metadata to construct comprehensive pictures of our lives.

So we shouldnâ€™t be comforted when government officials reassure us that theyâ€™re not listening to our communications â€“ theyâ€™re merely harvesting and mining our metadata.Â In a digital world, metadata can be used to construct nuanced portraits of our social relationships and interactions.

Itâ€™s long past time for Congress to update our surveillance and privacy laws to ensure that before the government can go digging through our digital lives, it needs to demonstrate to a judge that it has good reason to believe weâ€™ve done something wrong.

Look, that’s WHAT they’re doing (or able to do) with this information.

Is int’t WHY they want it.

The fact is that there isn’t enough intelligence in any computer to reliably counter crime in real-time, even IF the government had access to every piece of electronic information across the whole world in real-time.

WHY they want this data stored in their keeping is that, after you become embarrassing or dangerous to them, they can use it to destroy your credibility and, if necessary, frame you (for example, using the DoJ’s ludicrously lax “material support for terrorism” arguments).

WHAT and WHY are two very different things.

I shouldnt have to explain this to journalists at one of the biggest publishing companies on the planet.

Is the definition of Meta-data changing? In the past meta-data (data about the data) had not identifiable demographic tags. In other words, we’d have to actually see these files to understand whether they are a breach of privacy.

I think it’s a really dangerous game when the people at top can use a system like this to manipulate the very system they are at the top of. This is dangerous and can quickly be used for the wrong purpose — simply hoping that it is used for good is just not right.

What Americans should be most concerned about is other countries ganging up on us and declaring war on us. I believe it is inevitable since the spying that is of most concern is that which the US does on other countries. It’s now out in the open. Some countries, strong powerful ones have declared their hatred of our spying on their citizens. Whether one agrees with everything Orwell wrote, I believe his argument on Nationalism being a “positive” force is beyond reproach. Judge for yourself. It allowed the rise of fascism. We are setting up a scenario where other countries will inevitably asked by their population to stop us from doing it. And I believe in time it will happen. In fact, I believe war against US inevitable unless we stop.http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/site/work/essa ys/lionunicorn.html